Latest Steam survey shows Windows 11 finally overtaking Windows 10, gaming laptops on the rise

What just happened? Valve's latest Steam survey results have arrived, bringing with them some welcome news for Microsoft: almost three years after its official release, Windows 11 has finally surpassed Windows 10 to become the most-used OS among participants. Elsewhere, August was a month when laptop GPUs dominated the best-performers chart.

Windows 11 has been closing the gap on its predecessor in the Steam survey for a long time. August finally saw the newer OS surpass Windows 10, reaching a 49.17% user share as Windows 10 fell 3% to 47.09%.

It's always worth remembering that the Steam survey only includes data from platform users who opt-in. Window 11's global share, as reported by Statcounter, is 31%, around half of what Windows 10 boasts. However, Windows 11's global users have been increasing since April while Windows 10's userbase has been declining.

Moving onto the GPU section, the top four best-performers in August were all from laptops: the RTX 4060, 3060, 4050, and 4070, in that order. The top non-laptop card in this section was the RTX 4070 Super, which saw a 0.17% increase. AMD's best-performing RDNA 3 card was the RX 7900 XTX, up 0.03%.

Looking at the main GPU chart, the soon to be discontinued RTX 3060 remains the most popular card among survey participants, despite losing a 0.37% share last month. The RTX 4060 laptop GPU has now moved into second spot, ahead of the GTX 1650, a former number one. More than three-quarters of the all GPUs on the chart are from Nvidia. AMD makes up 15.4%, while Intel has 7.7%.

Another big change in last month's results is that simplified Chinese is once again the most common language (35%), moving ahead of English (31.1%). It's almost certain that the massive success of Black Myth: Wukong contributed to the rise of simplified Chinese as it's estimated that around 80% of all the game's players are from China. The massive number of Black Myth players also helped Steam reach a record 37 million concurrent players last week.

Elsewhere in the survey, almost half of all participants now have 16GB of RAM in their machines, and AMD eroded some of Intel's share in the CPU section – a third of participants' CPUs are from Team Red.

Finally, we see that 8GB remains the most common amount of VRAM, but it is declining as 12GB increases, despite some games making even 12GB of video memory feel outdated.

Masthead: Rui Silvestre